The present invention relates to an apparatus for recording information onto a recording medium, particularly to operations from a power-on event of the apparatus to a state in which the apparatus is capable of starting a step to record information onto the recording medium.
A conventional optical disc drive suffers from disadvantageous long time for its activation, i.e., from a halt condition of disc rotation to a steady-state condition of the rotation. Thus, an information recording apparatus such as the type for recording an image taking signal onto a recording medium, can not record the image taking signal onto the recording medium during some time lapsing after it has turned on, raising a problem that an image taking chance is missed.
In order to solve the problem, in an apparatus disclosed in JP-A No. 93918/1998, the following method is adopted to avoid a state in which an image taking signal cannot be recorded onto a recording medium.
In the apparatus cited above, after the user turns on the power-supply of the apparatus, a compressed and encoded signal obtained as a result of compression and encoding steps carried out on an image taking signal is stored temporarily in a memory means till a disk drive unit employed in the apparatus enters a state of being capable of recording information onto a recording medium. The compressed and encoded signal is referred to hereafter simply as an image taking signal. Then, at a stage the disk drive unit employed in the apparatus enters a state of being capable of recording information onto a recording medium, a recording means employed in the disc drive unit starts a recording operation while the operation of storing the following image taking signal into the memory means is being continued.
If the amount of information transferred from an image taking unit employed in the apparatus to the memory means per unit time is smaller than the amount of information recorded by the information recording means onto the recording medium per same unit time, the amount of information stored in the memory means will decrease gradually. At a stage the amount of information stored in the memory means becomes zero, the image taking signal is supplied from the image taking unit directly to the information recording means employed in the disc drive unit. This state is continued thereafter till the user enters a command to stop the recording operation.
If residual information is left in the memory means at the time the user enters a command to stop the recording operation, the recording operation is continued till its completion by recording all the residual information onto the recording medium.
As another method, it is also to possible to record an image taking signal, which has been stored temporarily in the memory means till a disk drive unit employed in the disc drive unit enters a state of being capable of recording information, onto a recording medium later. In this case, a seek operation is carried out to move a drive head unit to a position on the recording medium. This position on the recording medium follows a storage area reserved for the image taking signal stored temporarily in the memory means. Then, an image taking signal following the image taking signal stored temporarily in the memory means is supplied to the information recording means employed in the disc drive unit, taking precedence of the image taking signal stored temporarily in the memory means. Finally, after the user enters a command to stop the recording operation, the image taking signal stored temporarily in the memory means is recorded into the reserved storage area on the recording medium.
The methods described above are each disclosed as a method to avoid a state of being incapable of recording a signal onto a recording medium after the power-supply is turned on till the disc drive unit reaches a predetermined rotation.